User Experience

Back during the paleolithic Web era of 1995-1999, I held down my first full-time Web job at IBM. Most of my work from that era has been lost in a string of hard drive crashes, but my old cohort Ed...Read more »

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Michael Wesch (of The Machine is Us/ing Us fame) give a talk at the IDEA conference in New York, where he debuted two new videos that are now available online:...Read more »

Textmap is an experimental "entity search engine" with some nifty data visualization features for putting news stories in context. In addition to the kinds of things you might expect - like topic maps, and graphs showing the frequency of stories...Read more »

Jason Fried of 37 Signals points us to this vintage video clip of Mike Wallace interviewing Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1957, at the age of 90, Frank Lloyd Wright was in New York to supervise construction of his final masterpiece...Read more »

Last night I popped by the AIGA's Designing Audiences panel, an exploration of the changing role of designers in an increasingly user-generated world. A few notes: Host Ze Frank (of The Show fame) moderated the discussion, starting with his own...Read more »

Rarely have I felt so technologically inadequate as I did at yesterday's MobileCampNYC, an "unconference" about emerging mobile technologies at Pace University's downtown conference center. Hiding my humble Motorola flip-phone in my jacket pocket, I waded through a roomful of...Read more »

For anyone out there planning to attend the IA Summit in Las Vegas this weekend, I'll be giving a presentation Saturday morning entitled The Web That Wasn't: What if the Web had turned out differently? In the years leading up...Read more »

Next year Wikia (Jimbo Wales' for-profit outfit) will release a new Wikified search engine dubbed Wikiasari that purports to take a more human-centered approach to filtering search results by, among other things, giving a higher ranking to sites already dubbed...Read more »

On a 40-minute US Airways flight from Philadelphia to Richmond last night, I experienced what may be a new low in the annals of craven marketeering. After liftoff, the cabin video monitors descended, not to show the usual crappy inflight...Read more »

Pentagram has released a preview of the user interface for Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative, featuring the work of a design team led by Lisa Strausfield. It's difficult to evaluate the design without a better sense of how...Read more »

The Institute for the Future of the Book has published Internet theorist MacKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory (a.k.a. G4M3R 7H30RY) in a new experimental online format. It's an interesting foray - not to mention a remarkable contortion of Wordpress -...Read more »

The New York Times describes a meeting between "delightfully communist" Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and a Wall Street audience of bewildered investment bankers trying to wrap their heads around the idea of a company with no interest in maximizing its...Read more »

The Smithsonian has launched its new Smithsonian Photo Initiative, featuring a collection of 1800 images by 100 photographers gathered together in an online exhibit called "Enter the Frame," with an experimental interface that's heavy on tags and light on conventional...Read more »

Tim Gasperak pointed me to Photosynth, a provocative research prototype out of Microsoft Live Labs. The interface strikes me as flickr-meets-David Hockney-meets-Jaron Lanier. While the research site is short on any real technical details, it does offer a general description...Read more »

For anyone who missed last month's IA Summit, nform and Boxes and Arrows are sponsoring a series of teleconferences featuring selected presentations from the Summit. I'm on the docket to recap my session on Stone Age Information Architecture this Thursday...Read more »

Whit pointed me to Pandora, a new music recommendation service with a compelling twist. While most recommendation engines rely on some variation of collaborative filtering - the familiar "people who liked this also liked this" approach - Pandora takes an...Read more »

Now this is pretty slick, a demo of a gestural interface prototype from NYU's Jeff Han. The first minute or so is kind of "eh," with what seems like a fairly simplistic screensavery thing. But then it gets interesting, with...Read more »

A nice hit for my client Rollyo in today's Wall Street Journal, courtesy of Walt Mossberg: Rollyo stands for "Roll Your Own Search Engine." While it uses Yahoo's search technology, it allows you to target a query by limiting the...Read more »

The ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit just accepted my session proposal, so I'll be venturing up to Vancouver from March 23-27 to give a presentation entitled "Stone Age Information Architecture." Here's a rough sketch of what I plan to cover: Stone...Read more »

Swarmsketch is a fascinating experiment in harnessing the "collective consciousness" of the Web to create collaborative drawings. Each drawing is composed of up to 1000 individual strokes, each contributed by a different user; users can also vote on the weighting...Read more »

For the book I'm writing, I have been wrangling a few hundred references to articles, books and assorted Web documents, along with piles of stray notes. Trying to get a handle on this bibliographic sprawl, I have finally come to...Read more »

Media Lab alums Ben Fry and Casey Reas have introduced Processing 1.0, an open source graphical computing envionrment "developed by artists and designers as an open-source alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain." The beta release features prototype...Read more »

Can visual thinking patterns reveal anything about our political dispositions? A group of designers created the Visual Ideology project to investigate how preferences for certain kinds of images might reflect our political leanings. The researchers pose the question this way:...Read more »

In the product design world, one of the truisms that gets bandied around all the time goes something like this: designers are not users; users are not designers. "Don't listen to what users say," says Nielsen; "watch what they do."...Read more »

Musicplasma creates visualizations of collaborative filtering data about musical artists. While these kinds of hyperbolic treemaps are hardly a new idea, I think the execution works pretty well here; unlike most of those cloying Brain-style interfaces, I can actually envision...Read more »

flickr has sparked some good new writing lately - by Gene and Salon's Katharine Mieszkowski, among others - but the most cogent analysis to date comes from Nadav, in which he correctly deduces that flickr is not a YASNS, but...Read more »

U.Mass researchers have developed a new search tool for handwritten documents. The use of OCR'd text mapped to facsimile images reminds me of Olive's Activepaper tool, now in use at the British Library Newspaper Archive (via ">Battelle)...Read more »

It's a big day for RSS, as Yahoo! rolls out the long-awaited new My Yahoo!, which lets users add any RSS/Atom feed to the usual mix of syndicated Y! content. While the RSS feature has been in public beta as...Read more »

August 7, 2004

from The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception: Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today...Read more »

Before we had Nielsen, Norman et al. trying to codify principles for user experience design, Italo Calvino gave us Six Memos for the Next Millenium (his last published work before his death in 1985). I read the book about 15...Read more »

Just noticed that Amazon is beta-testing its new "plog" service, incorporating blog features directly into the home page. If you’re a registered user, Amazon now displays blog entries in the center column, pre-populated with recommendations from the “Amazon NewReleaseBot." They've...Read more »

Another eye-opening historical image collection, this one from UC-Berkeley: Magic Lantern slides. These hand-colored glass slides, precursors to film transparencies, enjoyed a brief heyday in the early 20th century. I love the spectral quality of these images, with their handmade...Read more »

Scirus is a new specialty search engine for scientific research, that lets users trawl through a few million science-related Web sites (mostly of the .edu variety) along with scholarly journal databases like MEDLINE, ScienceDirect and BioMed. This is a good...Read more »

Matt Webb has started posting an RSS feed of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks. It's a neat experiment, but seeing the great Leonardo reduced to raw ASCII feels somehow deflating; without the original visual context of the manuscript, it seems like...Read more »

For the past few months, I've been working with the California Digital Library on "Documenting the American West," a new online collection of primary source materials (like photos, letters and manuscripts) drawn from disparate locations in California, Colorado, the Library...Read more »

May 24, 2004

A pithy ALA article on the perils of project management: Many project managers believe a project has a beginning and an end. Everything that happens within those parameters can be dealt with by a methodology and a good framework of...Read more »

While I’ve been known to take exception with Clay Shirky in the past, I found myself agreeing with almost every word of his latest essay, Situated Software. Drawing on his recent experience directing student projects at ITP, Shirky muses on...Read more »

Nadav points us to GUIdebook, "a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing as many Graphical User Interfaces as possible." For instance, Windows 1.0: And the late (though not-much-lamented) OS/2 Warp:...Read more »

For most anyone who participates in online discussion lists, the term "lurker" usually carries a negative connotation. Conventional wisdom seems to hold the quiet lurker as deadweight, an intellectual parasite who consumes without giving anything back. I've always had a...Read more »

Salon is running my article In Search of the Deep Web, in which I take a look at the expansion of search engines into the recesses of the dynamic Web. When I started writing the piece about three weeks ago,...Read more »

Steve Toub pointed me to Search Tuna, a new search engine that brokers queries across multiple search engines, then mails you the results. From the site blurbage: Search Tuna "swims deep" into the web, analyzes what it discovers, and emails...Read more »

Daniel Dennett, quoted in Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works: A flow chart is typically the organizational chart of a committee of homunculi (investigators, librarians, accountants, executives); each box specifies a homunculus by precribing a function without saying how it...Read more »

Peter is doing some worthwhile digging into the heritage of user-centered design, focusing lately on the work of 1950s designer Henry Dreyfuss, who may just be the father of personas: > Peterme on Designing for People...Read more »

Hot on the heels of its fizzled Friendster bid, Google is making its foray into social networking before the buzzword-bubble bursts, with the newly stealth-launched (and desperately-in-need-of-a-naming-consultant) Orkut. CNET: Google spawns social networking service...Read more »

Just stumbled across John Battelle's new Searchblog, in which the former Wired and Industry Standard honcho expounds on the search wars, and pre-hypes his book-in-progress, tentatively entitled The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google - complete with...Read more »

Lots of discussion in the ID world about Remail, IBM's new research prototype for a next-generation email client. Several folks have compared Remail favorably to Outlook 2003, but I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as Remail is a research...Read more »

Macromedia announces Flex (previously code-named Royale), which looks to be their attempt at blunting Microsoft Avalon with a J2EE- and XML-based presentation server framework. Not coincidentally, it comes endorsed out of the gate by IBM. Flex consists of a presentation...Read more »

In other Longhorn news, I came across several tidbits about Avalon, Microsoft's new XML-based UI framework that looks to be the long-rumored Flash-killer. I'm still getting up to speed, but here a few things I've picked up so far: simple...Read more »

Infovis has posted a few snapshots of Aero, the "life immersion" component of Longhorn, Microsoft's next-generation Windows UI. This so-called Carousel View seems to pick right up on Microsoft VP of R&D Rick Rashid's social networks shpiel at ETCON a...Read more »

Nadav points out Amazon's new "Search Inside" feature, whereby you can now do full-text searching within selected books in their catalog. Nifty. Nadav also asks the entirely reasonable question of why the Library of Congress isn't already doing this? As...Read more »

Geert Lovink on German philosopher-engineer Werner Künzel, in his 1992 essay The Archeology of Computer Assemblage: Künzel practices ‘Ars Combinatoria’ in his own unique way: he proves that there is a promising future to thinking in rhizomatic bifurcations, applied at...Read more »

Ted Nelson, Way out of the Box: The usual story about Xerox PARC, that they were trying to make the computer understandable to the average man, was a crock. They imitated paper and familiar office machines because that was what...Read more »

Victor wonders: [I]s there a reason we haven't moved to a project-based model of employment like the movie industry uses, employing those who are just right for a particular product ... Would it be helpful to put a more flexible...Read more »

Cataloging Cultural Objects was designed specifically for those communities engaged in describing and documenting works of art, cultural artifacts, and their visual surrogates: museum professionals, visual resources curators, archivists, librarians, or anyone who documents cultural objects and their images....Read more »

Macromedia has just released the first public beta of Central, a new browser-less environment for Flash-based applications. I spent the better part of this year working with Macromedia on Central, consulting on the overall UI framework and a series of...Read more »

Ray Ozzie points out Power to the Edge, a new book about the effects of peer-to-peer communications on large organizations. Open-sourced in its entirety, this insightful, forward-looking piece of analysis comes from a surprising source: The Department of Defense. From...Read more »

Just playing around with Google AdSense, thus the text ads on the right. While I have no high hopes of earning more than a few micro-cents from this, I'm interested in seeing what kind of ads Google seems to think...Read more »

Hypertext theorist George Landow (also my former prof) on the devolution of authorship: In reducing the autonomy of the text, hypertext reduces the autonomy of the author. Lack of textual autonomy, like lack of textual centredness, immediately reverberates through conceptions...Read more »

Former Suckster and all-around weisenheimer Greg Knauss returns to the scene with The Devil's Dictionary 2.0. My favorite so far: social software, noun Any arbitrary collection of algorithms, protocols and metadata that allows friendless agoraphobics to pretend otherwise. “I’m having...Read more »

Mike Kuniavsky hops on the blog train with the inscrutably titled Orange Cone, announcing his intention to write about smart personal technology, smart furniture, the social economic and political implications thereof, and, of course, "me."...Read more »

Having been a lit major at the only college in the country that offered an undergraduate degree in Semiotics, I've always felt vaguely guilty about my own near-total ignorance of the subject. In college, we tended to write off the...Read more »

Lena Shelton pointed me to the work of Michael Buckland, a professor of information management at the Berkeley SIMS program. Browsing through his bibliography, I came across several intriguing - if admittedly pointy-headed-sounding - pieces like: What is a "document"?...Read more »

From Designers: Time for a Change: [T]he design profession functions as if each individual designer is selling his or her services in some sort of terminological vacuum, with nothing more substantial than his or her personal charisma and taste...Read more »

Doing some research over at the SF Public Library yesterday, I came across a rare first edition of Ted Nelson's Computer Lib. Long out of print since its 1974 publication, the book is now so hard to come by that...Read more »

a couple of eye-openers from the latest Harper's Index: Amount the Defense Department has lost track of, according to a 2000 report by its inspector general: $1,100,000,000,000 Ratio of this amount to the rest of the world's military budgets combined:...Read more »

Never short on hubris, the kids at MIT have released a new environment called Haystack, billing itself as the world's first "universal information client": Haystack is a tool designed to let every individual manage all of their information in the...Read more »

Edward Tufte sets his sights on "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint," in which he argues that our growing reliance on presentation-ware leads to a weakening of verbal and spatial reasoning skills, and "almost always corrupt statistical analysis" (via Ed)....Read more »

I came across this list of SARS blogs, several of them emanating from mainland China, where a few intrepid bloggers seem to be circumventing the official Beijing party line with man-on-the-street reports of what it's really like to be living...Read more »

For about as long as there have been Web browsers, it seems, people have been predicting their imminent demise. The phrase "beyond the browser" has become such a catchphrase on the conference-and-trade-rag circuit as to have become almost an inside...Read more »

Steven Johnson feels the need to clarify his position that we're not ants, responding to a discussion on Joi Ito's site about whether weblogs constitute a form of emergent intelligence. the argument goes something like this: just as ant colonies...Read more »

Chris Rusay and I worked together last year on a project for the Province of British Columbia (who, operating as they do in government time, haven't quite gotten around to launching it yet). Chris has just published an article on...Read more »

challis has posted an interesting analysis of his survey on ux job titles. I am actually kind of pleased to see all this variation in job titles; this should be a ray of hope for generalists (like me) who still...Read more »

a feisty little rant from Ted Nelson, hypertext pioneer and, according to Tim Berners-Lee, progenitor of the World Wide Web. from I Don't Buy In: The Web isn't hypertext, it's DECORATED DIRECTORIES! What we have instead is the vacuous victory...Read more »

There's no surer sign that a media trendline must have run its course than when it winds up in one of those interminable magazine year-end lists. But as big media zeitgeist-gazing exercises go, today's NYT Magazine issue on "The Year...Read more »

Last night, I went to see Howard Rheingold speak at BayCHI, promoting his new book Smart Mobs. What I already knew about Howard Rheingold: that he was a certifiable eminence gris from back when people still used words like “Digerati”...Read more »

I wouldn't go quite that far - perhaps "hegemony" would be a better word (though "tyranny of the browser" does have that certain guru-soundbite ring going for it). still, I do agree with much of what Nielsen has to say...Read more »

the estimable blackbeltjones points us to alan moore on information and entropy, penned in the wake of 9/11. i've been a slavish fan of moore ever since he started producing genre-bending comic book pieces like swamp thing and watchmen back...Read more »

Ever since we fielded that eleventh-hour call from Rob Burgess' office on the eve of DevCon a few days ago, we've been on the receiving end of an unexpected little PR putsch. It turned out Burgess wanted to demo our...Read more »

I suppose it was just a matter of time before someone started working on a protocol for IP-based remote touch sensing. Virtual touch is of course well-trodden turf for sci-fi/fantasy writers. But never mind all those VR geek body glove...Read more »

semantic web-heads, take note: iaslash has published excerpts from an article on ontologies vs. taxonomies, an Online magazine piece in which Katherine Harris splits a few philosophical hairs between the CS world view and the LIS world view. I have...Read more »

There's been no shortage of high-minded blather lately about social networks as being the new new thing in the software world. Rick Rashid talked about Microsoft's vision for a at ETCON; Peter Morville, Peter Merholz, Howard Rheingold and other smart...Read more »

Portland's Second Story turns out another of their consistently impressive pieces in the Theban Mapping Project, an interactive archeological atlas that melds data, maps and documentary video into an immersive learning experience. an effective - and appropriate - use of...Read more »

nadav thinks the new iTunes exemplifies a PC application that escapes the basic desktop/file/folder metaphor that has dominated PC computing for the past, oh, 30 years. he also points to this old Wired article on Lifestreams, David Gelernter's blue-sky idea...Read more »

Aula is a new community blog project based out of Helsinki, powered by about 400 brainy Finns who seem to write better English than most Americans I've worked with. Smart writing, meaty links, and a snazzy little design template that...Read more »

I came this close to going to the AIGA Experience Design forum in Las Vegas last weekend, but ultimately decided I really needed a weekend at home after a month of family visits and traveling. fortunately, erin malone has written...Read more »

Katherine Jones turns out to be one of the brainiac designers behind all those futurama interface concepts in Minority Report. After trading a few emails, Kat was kind enough to share some of her early prototype sketches with me, which...Read more »

interface geeks, get thee hence to see Minority Report - possibly the closest thing I have seen to interface porn. the movie offers a steady diet of whizzy "interface of the future" concepts - none of which, it must be...Read more »

after missing the opportunity to see Ted Nelson the other night, I've been poking around looking into what the man's been up to for the past, oh, thirty years - ever since he first dreamed up this whole wacky idea...Read more »

... about this little soiree at the exploratorium on Social Networks, Planetary Visualization and Dynamic InfoScapes, if only for the chance to see two of my favorite greybeard polymaths - Ted Nelson and James Burke - hawking their latest demo-ware....Read more »

so today was Day One for me over at Macromedia - and who should I cross paths with in a meeting but the good Doctor himself. much more than that I suppose I shouldn't really be mouthing on about just...Read more »

compression, decompression, and "engineering subversion" last night i went to see will wright, creator of simcity and the sims, giving a talk at berkeley as part of their art, technology and culture colloquium series. not knowing much about wright, and...Read more »

Lou chimes in Lou Rosenfeld, oft-credited as the godfather of the IA discipline, has just hopped on the blog train with Bloug. should make for a good read. a few months back, i did an interview with Lou for the...Read more »

google killer? Teoma is a new web search enging being touted as the next big thing beyond Google. here's the hook: whereas Google ranks sites based on (among other things) the # of links appearing on other sites, Teoma takes...Read more »

via good experience, webword has an interview with Steve Krug, the famously low-profile usability guru and author of don't make me think.nothing particularly ground-breaking here, but a friendly little discussion on usability metrics and low-budget approaches to usability engineering. worth...Read more »

Ed Chi and co. over at Xerox PARC have been doing some interesting research on the information foraging on the Web - complete with a catchy tagline, "the scent of information" - an ecological approach to studying how users look...Read more »

more on the dotcom graveyard beat ... bryan boyer has written a heartfelt personal eulogy for deepleap, the web app company he cofounded last year. it's a genuinely written piece, refreshingly devoid of anger, nostalgia or self-pity... just a straight...Read more »

further navel-gazing on the blog phenom so, it seems i'm not alone in harboring a few latent doubts about the whole blog phenomenon. the good folks at a list apart have just published a piercing - if rather ardently one-sided...Read more »

matt newell pointed me to the dialectizer, a joke translator that converts web pages into "dialectized" versions in various faux dialects like swedish chef, cockney, and moron. ok, so it's a stale joke - even by stupid web trick standards...Read more »